[WikiEN-l] Interesting article on restored copyrights in US works between 1923 and 1964

[Ray Saintonge]

Andrew Gray wrote:
> [posted to commons-l and wikien-l; someone may want to forward it to
> wikisource-l, perhaps?]
>
> I've just run across this article, which might be of use in helping
> those who work on the eternal problem of determining whether or not a
> given 20th-century work is in copyright in the US.
>
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july08/hirtle/07hirtle.html
>
> Copyright Renewal, Copyright Restoration, and the Difficulty of
> Determining Copyright Status - Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell University
>
> D-Lib Magazine, July/August 2008
> Volume 14 Number 7/8
>
> "It has long been assumed that most of the works published from 1923
> to 1964 in the US are currently in the public domain. Both non-profit
> and commercial digital libraries have dreamed of making this material
> available. Most programs have recognized as well that the restoration
> of US copyright in foreign works in 1996 has made it impossible for
> them to offer to the public the full text of most foreign works. What
> has been overlooked up to now is the difficulty that copyright
> restoration has created for anyone trying to determine if a work
> published in the United States is still protected by copyright. This
> paper discusses the impact that copyright restoration of foreign works
> has had on US copyright status investigations, and offers some new
> steps that users must follow in order to investigate the copyright
> status in the US of any work. It argues that copyright restoration has
> made it almost impossible to determine with certainty whether a book
> published in the United States after 1922 and before 1964 is in the
> public domain. Digital libraries that wish to offer books from this
> period do so at some risk."
>
> The minefield is even murkier than we thought, it seems.
>   

The unabridged version is at 
http://ecommons.library.cornell.edu/bitstream/1813/10884/6/Copyright_renewal_final.pdf

The trimming was all from the segment on "Risk management and copyright 
restoration"  We really *never* can be sure about the copyright status 
of anything, and a risk management approach may be preferable.

Ec